Controlling assets through a defined space is a task that has both civilian and military uses. In a most common situation, air traffic control may involve moving commercial airplanes through airspace. Air traffic control has, in common with tasking military assets, the coordinated movement of multiple assets through a crowded space filled with terrain, weather, and other obstructions.
The U.S. Air Traffic Control or ATC system is heavily burdened. In the first nine months of 2000, for example, one in four aircraft in the National Airspace System (NAS) found itself plagued by system delays averaging 50 minutes per aircraft and affecting 119 million people. The ATC system is under heavy demand, particularly along the east coast. This demand has grown steadily the past few decades. For example, air carrier departures in 1999 rose 12% over departures logged in 1994. Air traffic has grown more than 2.5 times since 1974.
The current U.S. Air Traffic Control System includes 20 Air Route Traffic Control Centers or “Centers” that are the largest ATC facilities interacting directly with the aircraft. Each Center is responsible for the safety and efficient transit of aircraft through their assigned segment of the airspace. Controllers at the Centers communicate with individual aircraft that are generally at high altitudes or away from major airports. The Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) facilities house controllers that are responsible for the airspace within approximately 40 miles of major airports. Towers are responsible for approaches and departures of aircraft as well as taxiing at a specific airport.
Air traffic control relies heavily upon verbal communications between controller and pilot. In tactical communications between the controller and all of the pilots within the controller's airspace, only a single VHF channel is available for communications. Due to the number of communications that must occur between the controller and the pilots and the poor quality of the communication channel, it is critical for the communications to exhibit a clear intent spoken expeditiously.
To date, there has been little ability to improve the viability of verbal air traffic control. One such improvement to the controlling of aircraft in the airspace has included FAA & the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) honing the language used in verbal communications to such an extent that there exists an ICAO standard phraseology requiring timely feedback, thereby minimizing ambiguity about the sender's true intent. This standard phraseology has also improved the speed with which the sender communicates. Nonetheless, the incremental improvements in speed achieved by these measures has not been sufficient to deal with the ever-mounting control load.
Communication is also important to the Traffic Management Coordinators within a facility. Though not directly influencing the safety of a particular aircraft, inadequate or misleading communications may lead dozens of aircraft along inefficient paths. The aircraft's routing decisions may arise from miscommunication between ATC, the flight crew, or the airline, or from the fact that one party was lacking a critical piece of information. If the full content of the message is communicated using the wrong vocabulary or notation (the message is poorly encoded), then the message's intent is lost. The message must also be sent in a timely fashion. If the message is sent too late, then the content of the message is lost, no matter how accurately it is transmitted.
Additionally, ATC controllers make decisions about routing without knowledge of flight capabilities of aircraft, fuel state, or aircraft attitude. Controllers propose flight paths by selecting from predefined flight paths chosen to suitably match the flight characteristics common to the least capable of likely aircraft to use the space. Thus, where high performance aircraft occupy a space in proximity to lower performance aircraft, separations are selected to rule out the likelihood of interference in spite of the great disparity in performance. Packing the airspace in this manner fails to exploit the space available where performances are more closely matched.
What is needed is a method, system, and software product to more efficiently pack a three-dimensioned airspace with flight paths chosen to exploit the space efficiently.